Ad Agencies and Social Media Marketing – Salesforce Marketing Cloud Blog Series with Jim Tobin

In a series of interviews with our friends at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Jim Tobin, President of Ignite Social Media, discusses the current landscape of ad agencies and social media, social media integration, collaboration between agencies, and how clients view social media marketing success. These interviews are published in full as a four-part series (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4) on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Blog.

The Current Landscape of Ad Agencies and Social Media

Have most agencies caught up to the current social media landscape?

Many advertising, PR, or even SEO agencies today are thinking about social media as part of the marketing mix, but it seems its an afterthought. They aren’t thinking about social media from the beginning of a project, but instead asking themselves: How can we improve this advertisement with social? Or, how can we improve our public relations with social? Agencies should set clear goals for social media marketing elements and then map the course.

What’s the process agencies should use to integrate social media into the mix?

Agencies can create a separate business unit or team to think about the same client challenges that the creative team is thinking about it, but this team will approach the problem with a focus on social media solutions. Then everyone comes back to the table and informs the strategy from both sides.

Part 1: See the full post on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Blog

How Agencies Can Show Social Media Success to Clients

Do clients completely “get” social media yet?

Marketers tend to feel they have expertise in how everything works but get tired and frustrated with trying to keep up with the many and constant changes in social media. Clients want to know that social media marketing can work. Clients don’t want to talk about the buzz and the technology, they want to talk about their business and trust that you know how to apply the technology in a way that can impact their business.

How do clients want to measure social media success?

We still get the occasional question that only skims the surface, like “what’s my fan count?”, but more and more questions dig deeper into how social media marketing is impacting revenue.

Part 2: See the full post on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Blog

How Ad Agencies Succeed at Paid, Owned and Earned Media

How difficult is the collaboration between different media teams?

Collaborating with different media teams can be challenging if the order isn’t aligned properly. Many clients have an ad agency, a PR firm, or a media-buying firm, so collaboration is an absolute must. The trick is the independent thinking, and understanding that the time frames are very different.

Where is the role of the agency headed in an era of converged media?

Collaboration, brainstorming, and working together requires being in a meeting, throwing out an idea, and working to make something better. This leads people to say, “Wouldn’t it be better if we just had one agency that handled everything for us?” You could do that, but the skill set to do advertising, to build a website, to do social media marketing are so very different, and the agency construct is different as well.

Part 3: See the full post on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Blog

The Ins and Outs of the Social Media Agency

Are There Types Of Social Campaigns That You Work On Most Frequently?

Is Hiring For An Agency Specializing in Social Media Easy or Difficult?

Part 4: See the full post on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Blog

Share your stories of collaboration with us in the comments below. Thank you to Andrew Gothelf and Salesforce Marketing Cloud for featuring Jim Tobin and Ignite Social Media in these recent posts.



Ignite Social Media